Bankstown-Lidcombe gas tragedy: Grieving mother rejects hospital changes
THE mother of the baby who died because of the Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital gas bungle said yesterday’s changes “weren’t good enough”.
NSW
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THE mother of the baby who died because of the Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital gas bungle said yesterday’s changes announced by the Health Minister “weren’t good enough” and had come “too late”.
Sonya Ghanem has been unable to sleep since losing her baby John on July 13 after he was wrongly given nitrous oxide instead of oxygen, just weeks after another baby was left severely disabled by the same error.
Ms Ghanem welcomed news a hospital engineer had been stood down and that NSW Health had suspended all work with the gas company BOC.
But she said what had been done to date still “wasn’t good enough” and she had many unanswered questions and concerns.
“It’s just not good enough, I’ll never forgive them,” she said.
Ms Ghanem said she wasn’t convinced another gas tragedy would not happen again.
She said “a zillion dollars in compensation” could not fix what happened and all that she wanted was for them to “bring my son back”.
“I want to warn others to be careful,” she said. “I want no other parents to go through what we went through. It could happen again, how do you know it is not going to happen again in two or three years’ time?”.
The report released yesterday found the affected pipe was installed and certified by industrial gas contractor BOC Limited in July 2015 after an oxygen bottle ran out while a baby was being resuscitated.
However BOC says the original installation of the pipes was not conducted by its contractors.
“It was found during an inspection by police, hospital staff and BOC that both the medical oxygen and medical nitrous oxide pipelines were incorrectly labelled prior to BOC’s work being undertaken at the hospital in July 2015,” the company said.
The report has not yet identified whether any other hospital managers or staff contributed to the tragedy, and more statements are being collected.
A full report is due by August 25.
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